I pointed my camera towards the spot where the humpback whales had last surfaced and waited. It didn’t look glamorous by any means, but it meant I was far less likely to fall in. Aside from the occasional slap of swell against the boat I couldn’t hear a sound. It was a strange sensation – sharing a fjord with such massive animals and not knowing where they were. For all I knew they were right beneath us.

A flash of silver caught my eye and I looked down to see a herring spring out of the water within an arm’s reach of me. My heart squeezed as two more fish appeared. After that brief warning, four colossal mouths burst out of the water mere feet from where I was squatted, now frozen to the spot. This was a lunge feed – the humpback whales had trapped the fish against the surface and were now enveloping huge shoals in their rippling throats and filtering water out through their baleen plates. It all lasted a mere few seconds, and just before the whales sunk back under, I broke out of my paralysis to finally take a photo. My telephoto lens was far too cropped to capture the sheer vastness of the scene in front of me. Moments later the frothing water was the only sign they’d been there. I was shaking.

Two weeks earlier our group of six arrived in Tromsø, northern Norway. After a three-hour drive even further north, we arrived at our accommodation, which sat on the edge of a fjord and was framed on all sides by mountains. We were lucky the view was so pretty because for the next ten days we would be housebound in quarantine. It was essential that we followed Norway’s COVID-19 requirements exactly. Steve Truluck, who organises the trips to Norway and skippers the hire boat, contacted the Norwegian Institute for Public Health to ensure we knew all the guidelines before travelling. We would be staying near a small fishing village called Skjervøy, which at the time of our trip in October 2020 had only had one documented case of COVID-19 all year. The local community agreed that tourists were welcome as long as they followed the rules.

We were all tested for coronavirus on arrival and received negative results, and the owner of our accommodation brought our groceries, so we didn’t have to leave the house at all. This may have driven some people crazy, but our quarantine was an adventure in and of itself. From the living room window, we saw velvet scoters, willow tits, harbour porpoises and white-tailed eagles that soared right over the house. However, we were here for whales, and by the eighth day of our quarantine there still hadn’t been any reported sightings.

In this area of Norway, the whales follow the herring, which are drawn into the fjords each winter from around late October. “The herring switch their preferred location every few years,” explains Steve. “The herring used to overwinter in Tysfjord. After a number of years, it moved north to Tromsø where it spent three or four years overwintering. Since November 2017 the herring have overwintered near Skjervøy. It is never definite that the herring will show up in a specific location.”

If the herring arrived late or gathered far offshore where we couldn’t reach them, we had no chance of seeing any whales. All we could do was finish our quarantine and hope that our efforts hadn’t been wasted.

On the 4^th November, our penultimate day inside, we were working in our home office as usual when Steve shouted “whale!” and the five of us dashed to the window. Far off in the distance was a tiny silver cloud against the dark base of the mountain. All whale blows are different, but these were the unmistakably bushy blows of humpback whales. That distant puff of air meant one thing: the herring had arrived.

Once our quarantine had ended, we wasted no time in getting out on the water. Within ten minutes of leaving the harbour on the first morning, a humpback whale surfaced near the boat. Its breath came in a burst like air rushing out of a tyre. Suddenly half a fluke appeared, lobtailing briefly. After so much uncertainty it was finally happening. The whale arched its back and lifted its huge tail fluke out of the water, sinking into a dive and out of sight.

In Arctic Norway, there’s another marine mammal that features high on everyone’s wish list. The largest species of dolphin in the world, the orca, is perhaps the most easily recognised cetacean. I was longing to see my first orcas but so far there had been no sign of them near Skjervøy. On our fourth day on the boat, we were still searching. There was an uneasy feeling in my stomach from the lurching waves and the cold squeezed my hands and feet.